Yes, the W3C is a membership based organization, and if you want to vote for instance on who gets to be on its Advisory Board, or have a say in the Charter of Working Groups, you need to be a member, and pay.
For the WHATWG, you don't get to vote on who's on the Steering Group, and you don't get a say on what new Workstreams are started / changed / stopped, even if you did want to pay. That's up to Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Sure anybody can suggest stuff (but that's true at the W3C too), but they decide, and there's no way into that club.
Not to claim that W3C is perfect. Plenty of improvements are needed. But claiming that small business or individuals cannot participate just isn't true.
However, all W3C specs are developed in the open, nowadays on github, and feedback from anyone anywhere is taken seriously. Don't like something about css? go here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues. Something wrong with SVG? https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues. An issue with the Payment Handler API? https://w3c.github.io/payment-handler/. Dislike the way W3C itself works? That's here: https://github.com/w3c/w3process
Yes, the W3C is a membership based organization, and if you want to vote for instance on who gets to be on its Advisory Board, or have a say in the Charter of Working Groups, you need to be a member, and pay.
For the WHATWG, you don't get to vote on who's on the Steering Group, and you don't get a say on what new Workstreams are started / changed / stopped, even if you did want to pay. That's up to Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Sure anybody can suggest stuff (but that's true at the W3C too), but they decide, and there's no way into that club.
Not to claim that W3C is perfect. Plenty of improvements are needed. But claiming that small business or individuals cannot participate just isn't true.